There should be more Why not? in Koreans. Wish Umma and Appa would partake of that American spirit.
*
In the new schoolyear, Ruth goes off to Mount Holyoke.
A couple weeks after she leaves, I send her a long, handwritten letter. I quote a Shakespearean sonnet and every Romantic poet I know. I check the mailbox for a reply every day for a month. When she finally writes back, Ruth says how much the world has opened up to her. She’s discovered philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology; no mention of literature. She “exhorts” me to consider going to a small liberal arts college, too, Amherst, Haverford, Swarthmore. Take the road not taken, she tells me, and get a proper education. And meet all sorts of interesting people. Maybe I could even play D-III baseball there.
It’s the last I hear from her.
19
Mid-February 1998
The climb is harder than it looked from the village. The mountain is not steep, but the path is narrow, uneven, laden with jagged stones. I pause to rest, sit on a rock, and fill my lungs with the mountain air, cool and damp. I take a long pull from my thermos of cold barley water. The late afternoon sun is still strong, and I feel my shirt clinging to my back from perspiration. The trees are mostly bare, but they provide some shade. Down below, I can make out the village, a chessboard of thatched roofs.
As I climb, the air thins and my breath cuts more quickly. Finally, I reach a clearing. The light has faded, and the place is shrouded in mist. There is a single thatched hut. In front are burlap sacks and straw baskets filled with rice and grains and cinched with twine. Smoke rises, not from a stone chimney but from a pile of twigs and leaves in the front yard. The burning leaves sound like the fluttering of sparrows in flight. The smoke spirals skyward into the mist. I cross the clearing, and I see the house is old but sturdy, built of pine, darkened with age. Rice paper, yellowed in spots, covers the windows.
“Yeoboseyo,” I say, a couple of times, each time louder.
An old man peeks out from behind the front door. His thin face has deep creases, badges of a lifetime of hard work in the fields.
He recognizes me. “Doryungnim,” he says. Young master. He drops down to do a deep bow, which I stop in midmotion, stand him up. I bow to him instead.
He takes both my hands in his. His hands are callused, two large mollusk shells. “So tall,” he says, revealing black space where his front teeth used to be. “Your abuji . . . ,” he says, his voice trailing off.
His name is Yong Moon, but he is known in my family simply as Ajussi. He’s the caretaker of the Lee family mountain. He looks after Eunsan, Silver Mountain, living off the land. His father was the caretaker before him, also called Ajussi in his time. I heard he had a son who had had enough of the mountain life and went off to Yonsei University in Seoul, his tuition paid for by my father. The son now works as a pharmacist in the city.
Ajussi says little, just looks at me for a long time, smiling. He smiles more with his eyes than his mouth, in the way of people used to living alone. Ajussi takes my hand, wordlessly leads me on a walk to the other side of the clearing.
There, on a gentle slope of land, lie rectangular mounds of dirt, spaced a meter apart. Some are larger than others. In front of each mound is a simple slab of marble with three Chinese characters on it, and I recognize the Lee letter on each name. My ancestors’ tombs, going back generations. One of my uncles, my grandfather and grandmother, and my great-grandfather and his siblings, all buried here, side by side. There are over a dozen mounds in all. Grass and moss grow on the mounds, and they have become over the years and decades part of the mountain, as much as the trees and the streams.
I kneel on the ground, and I can feel the dampness at the knees of my pants as I do two keunjeol, deep bows, in front of each of them. It is the ancient rite of respect toward the ancestors, just as I was taught to do by my parents. Paying respect to a line of Lees, as Abuji often reminded me, going back over a thousand years.
Ajussi stands there, hands clasped in front. I stand next to him. It’s quiet here, a stillness not found in the city. It’s a quiet of distances, of great open spaces. A quiet that echoes.
“There used to be tigers in these mountains,” Ajussi says, breaking the silence. He tells me of the great fearsome horangyi, “majestic beasts,” that used to roam around here. Kings of the mountains. Their roar could be heard across valleys. People left them alone and did not hunt them, partly out of fear, partly respect. The tigers were believed to carry mystical powers. Sacred beasts, the horangyi. Killing one would incur the wrath of the mountain gods. “Your ancestors lived with them for generations. Until the Japanese soldiers killed them all,” he says, with disgust. “For sport.”
“Your halabuji . . . ,” he says but doesn’t finish.
A story from my childhood comes back to me. I was on a walk with my grandfather on a cool evening, and I asked him about the rumors about him and our family. People said during the colonial period, Japanese soldiers in their crisp khaki uniforms could be seen coming to and going from Halabuji’s house. I asked him if it’s true, the stories about his working as a Japanese collaborator. Is that how we got our wealth?
Halabuji told me then the old tale of “The Grateful Horangyi.” Once upon a time, a young man came upon a huge tiger lying groaning by the roadside. Scared but wanting to help, he asked the animal what was the matter, and the tiger roared and opened his mouth wide. There he saw a bone splinter stuck in the beast’s throat. The young man bravely put his hand in the tiger’s mouth and pulled the splinter out, saying, “There, all better now.” The tiger licked his savior’s hands and shed tears of gratitude before galloping away, his great tail swinging.
The next day, the young man went to the capital city of Hanseong to take the civil service exam. He had dreamed his whole life of becoming a high government official so that he might become wealthy and respected. But the exam was very difficult, and there were hundreds of qualified applicants who came from all over the country. He was resigned to failure and prepared to go back to his humble life in the village.
That night, the student had a dream in which a beautiful maiden appeared and said, “Do not despair. I shall repay you for your kindness yesterday.” She told him: “Tomorrow a wild tiger will rampage through the city. No one will be able to stop the tiger. The king will offer a big reward to anyone who can kill the wild animal. You shall take a bow and arrow and shoot the tiger with an arrow. Only you will be able to kill the beast. I know, because I am the tiger.” The student protested, “How can I commit such a cowardly act, to shoot an animal for nothing but my own glory? And how can I kill it, knowing it’s you?” The mysterious girl said, “It is a reward for your virtuous heart,” and vanished into the air.
At dawn, a fearsome tiger appeared in the city and ran wild through the streets, just as the maiden had prophesied. No bowman could hit the beast. Panic and chaos swept the city. The king made a royal proclamation: “Whoever kills the tiger will be rewarded with a high court rank and land and a warehouse of rice!”
The young man, who had harbored doubts, could see now that this was his destiny. He stood up on the highest platform in the main street of the capital, aimed his bow, gave it a mighty pull, and shot one arrow. The arrow whistled through the air and found its mark. The tiger dropped dead.
The grateful king rewarded the brave young man with a nobleman’s title and all the riches befitting the position. But his greatest reward was the girl from his dream. She appeared before him, more beautiful in real life, and offered herself as his bride. They were married, and they lived a life of privilege and virtue.
I want to ask Ajussi if the killing of the tigers had something to do with the mountain curse I had heard about for so long.
“Lee family curse,” he says. “No more breath, no more life. Your abuji now, his buchin before him. All same disease.” I detect a soft tremble in his voice. “Curse. The mountain spirits. For our acts.” He says no more.
Darkness h
as descended on the mountain, and I can hear the rustle of evening wind.
“I raised your father,” he says, staring off in the distance. “From when he was a little boy. Such a gentle boy. He loved most playing in the apple orchard.” He tells me of how Abuji would know exactly which apples to pick. He carried the apples in his shirt, pulled in front to make an apron, always dropping a couple on the way. In the long summer afternoons, Ajussi could always find him under the shade of an apple tree, reading a book.
We stand wordlessly for a long time.
Ajussi lets out a sigh. “They want to buy the mountain,” he says. “One of the big-city chaebol. To turn it into a golf resort.” He turns to me, his eyes pools of stillness. “It’s yours now, Doryungnim. Your decision.”
“Not to worry,” I say. We’ll never sell. Curse and all, mountain spirits be damned, we’ll always keep our Eunsan, for eternity. For as long as there are Lees breathing.
“I will bring Abuji’s body here,” I tell him. “When it’s time. To be buried, where he belongs.”
Ajussi nods, as if he knew. As he has always known. “I will be here,” he says.
We embrace to say goodbye, and Seoul feels distant, a world away. I assure him, I’ll come back. And I start my long climb down the mountain in darkness.
20
Toward the end, Abuji lay motionless on his hospital bed for days. He breathed through two plastic tentacles extending from his nose to an oxygen tank. He gasped with each breath, clinging to the life every borrowed breath represented. Months of steroid treatment had left him a shriveled bundle of nerves and pain. The Appa of my childhood, once my rock of Gibraltar, now a form of unfamiliarity. “Adeul,” he finally said: home. We brought him home to spend his last days with us.
It had a name, what killed him, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. A disease that scars lung tissue and causes progressive dyspnea, until you can breathe no more. Cause unknown, cure nonexistent. “Idiopathic” from Greek, meaning unknown cause; “pulmonary” from the Latin pulmonarius, relating to the lung; “fibrosis,” new Latin, a condition of fibrous, or scarred, tissue. For once, defining the words, breaking them down to their roots, didn’t help me understand their meaning any better.
When Abuji was diagnosed, the doctor, a lung specialist, told us what a rare disease IPF is, discovered in only thirty thousand people a year in the United States. And how deadly. He showed us pictures of a fibrous lung, its thickened tissue blocking the airways, preventing oxygen from moving through the bloodstream to the brain and other vital organs. A disease, I’d thought at the time, that doesn’t even have the dignity of metaphor: denying you life literally by taking your breath away.
The doctor asked if there was any history of IPF in the family. If so, he explained quietly, there’s a ten times greater chance of getting it than someone without a familial IPF gene. Then he told us to prepare. He said the one-year mortality rate is higher than most cancers. Umma collapsed. She brought down a tray of food and bottles of pills as she fell; they clanged soundlessly on the floor. When we told Abuji, he nodded and, turning to me, said, “Don’t smoke.”
Those last days when I sat at his bedside at home, as Abuji drifted in and out of morphine-induced unconsciousness, my dreams and memories bled into one another. I dreamed of Abuji holding my hand on a beach, my small hand in his large hand. I saw him crumple up the report card, the one with a B+ in a sea of As, and the burn of shame returned to my face. I remembered him showing me how to throw a curveball. “That’s right, son. Snap that wrist.” A moment shared, lost.
I heard his laugh, gentle, ringing. I could feel the soft kiss he planted on the top of my head when he thought I was asleep. I saw his gaunt ghost at the piano, and I could hear his plaintive “Moonlight Sonata.” I imagined him sitting in his study, reading his sacred texts. Do we choose what to remember, and what to forget?
When I was seven or eight, Abuji took me on a hike with my grandfather up Bukhan Mountain. Three generations of Lee men together, he said; three jangnam. The path was rugged, and I struggled to keep up with the adults. Halabuji stopped often—for me, I’d thought.
At a clearing near the summit, we sat down on some smooth rocks, and they had makgulli, milky rice wine. Halabuji, out of breath, beads of sweat on his forehead, told me, “Your father was the best student in our village.” When he was accepted at Seoul National, the people in the village threw him a celebration. They slow-cooked a whole hog over a spit, and the meat was shared by everyone. “My son the scholar,” he said.
“Then war broke out,” Abuji added, as if that explained it all. The forgone opportunity, loss, the pain of what followed.
Halabuji stood up, breathed in the mountain air, and said, “Such fresh air . . . I wish I could breathe it some more.” That’s when my father found out about his father’s lung disease. I remembered the sadness in Abuji that day, his heavy silence on the walk down, though I didn’t understand at the time. Our relentless family cycle.
At the end, Abuji lay on his bed lost in his thoughts and memories. I tried to talk to him about the life he had lived, the half I had shared with him. About the life that was the sum of our moments together, ours alone, once. I recounted to him stories of our trips together, hiking the Milford Track in New Zealand, just the two of us, riding horses in the steppes of Mongolia. The copper smell of the ger we slept in, the saddle sores, our guide, Nergui, who kept pushing us to go boar hunting, all remembered aloud. I wondered if he’d understood our trips were my way of trying to make amends to him, for going my way, not his.
Abuji responded mostly with silence. Once, he asked for his father, asking where his abuji was. Another time, he gained consciousness just long enough to reach for my hand. Mostly we sat for long stretches in shared quiet. I listened to his labored breathing. Struggling to gain a few precious last breaths. The hissing respirator, the low hum of the cardiogram machine. Even now they echo in the stillness of my mind.
“Woori adeul,” he said at the end, looking at me. My son. A moment of recognition, and comprehension, acceptance maybe. Years of pain and sadness and happiness and wonder compressed in that moment. A feeble squeeze of my hand, one final breath. Then he floated away, as if pulled in a soft current. And I was left, alone.
III
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow . . .
William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
21
Mid-February 1998
The Seoul Philharmonic performs Mozart Symphony No. 41. Jee Yeon is one of a dozen cellists in the orchestra; she sits in the second chair. Her torso sways as she plays, almost sensuously, with sweeps of her bow. Then she floats, eyes closed, on gossamer wings of lyrical flight. In the curve of her bare right arm, thin, taut, vibrating as she plucks music out of her instrument, is localized the sum of her graceful beauty.
Jee Yeon’s grace can be liberating, I muse, for the person with her. You could be lifted with her. She could cover for your own sins and failings. Maybe make you regard the world, and your own life, with its baffling twists and soul-defeating turns, more forgivingly.
“Wonderful performance,” I tell her as she comes off the stage. I apologize for not bringing a bouquet of flowers, like everyone else.
She thanks me for coming and adds, “Next time, Dae Joon-ssi.”
Jee Yeon’s family has a reception afterward at a private room at the Kukje Hotel, and Minister Choi invites me to join. Her family and friends fill the room, and uniformed waiters serve glasses of white wine. Everyone compliments Jee Yeon on her debut recital, says what a smashing success it was. And such a beautiful gown.
Minister Choi introduces me to Jee Yeon’s father, Chairman Chung. The owner, I was told, of a midsize
chaebol, Pyunghwa Group, specializing in defense equipment. I bow; the chairman puts his hand out for a Western handshake. I grip it in both hands and half-bow again.
“Heard much about you, Lee Yisa,” he says. “A high financier. Hahbadeu-trained.” He has full command of his thoughts and words. And his posture, betraying his military roots.
The minister already sketched his brother-in-law’s background to me. A pet student of Park Chung Hee when Park taught at the ROK Military Academy. Parlayed the Park mentorship into a small defense contractor business. First ball bearings and pins for grenades. Hit the big time with tear gas. Worshipped President Park as a born leader, a true patriot. Preached Park’s “economic development over that democracy crap.” Believed that’s just what Hanguk needed then and has made Korea what it is today.
“Still just learning,” I say. “Sir.”
His piercing eyes show someone used to judging. “Not just well educated,” he says to DPM Choi. “Humble, too.” He hands me his business card, which has two simple lines, Pyunghwa Group, Hwejang, or Chairman.
“Why don’t you come by the office,” the chairman tells me. “Talk man-to-man. Call my office—my bisuh will arrange it.” With a heavy pat on my back that feels like a reprimand, he goes away, leaving me alone in a corner with Jee Yeon.
She stands hands clasped in front of her. Not one for small talk. When she does speak, Jee Yeon rarely talks directly; she makes me figure out her meaning by context, by the nuances of her speech, and her subtle gestures. What Koreans call nunchi, eye-sense.
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